“No one else should see me before this Saint?”I clarified.
“Yes.”
“But you may?”
She smiled.“It is not a rule—just a courtesy.This way.”
At the top of the stairs my guide turned right, moving swiftly.Natural light touched the slate floor beneath our slippers, filtered through tall, narrow windows as we passed down a short hallway.At its end, an ancient, almost entirely circular archway of alternating yellow, blue and white stone opened into a vaulted, also circular chamber.
I’d been in places of worship before, from my village’s small chapel with its singular, gold-leafed icon of the Aeadine Saint in hisscarlet crown to Hesten’s gargantuan cathedral, its floor set with as many tombstones as tiles.This place had the same sense of gravity and reverence, but… more.Every inch of stone, wood, plaster, gold, ivory, anything in the space that might be carved was, and everything that could not be was painted with intricate Mereish psalms and patterns.
I shared Tane’s sense of a presence now, a similar feeling to when I stood next toHart’s figurehead or we encountered another ghisten ship at sea, but more elusive.There was another ghisting in this room.But where?In the carvings?In the door, as a guardian?
As in an Aeadine chapel, I expected a saint’s statue to be central to the chamber, properly pious and surrounded by offerings.But here I saw only a carved wooden pillar, graced by a beam of sunlight from a small, circular window.
I fixed my eyes on the pillar.
“The walls show the life of Saint Adalia,” my guide said, moving to the center of the chamber.Rows of cushions covered the floor in apparently random lines, but when I followed Nitha’s gaze, I realized they were positioned to face different sections of the carvings.
The nearest façade was carved of nearly black wood.Inlaid with pieces of opal, it depicted a woman crowned in beams of light, holding out her hands to rows and rows of kneeling onlookers.Her left hand cradled a small sun, its light illuminating half her body.The other half was cast in shadows, highlighted by a gentler, silver illumination from a full moon cradled in her right hand.The moon, I noticed, she held higher than the sun—one at her breast, one at her hip.
Facing Adalia, behind rows of carved, kneeling supplicants, were two robed figures.One was male, one ambiguous.Both mirrored the Saint with golden sunlight on half their bodies and silver moonlight and shadows on the other.The main differences, I saw, were in the positioning of their hands and the phases of the moons.One heldthe sun higher than the moon, while the final figure held them even.One moon was a sickle, the other a nearly invisible orb of obsidian.
“They represent the three suns and three moons of the Other,” Nitha murmured.She seemed pleased that the motif had stolen my focus and directed me on to the next section of the story.The three figures appeared again, their hands—the sun and the moon—held at new levels.“They balance the tides and in the spring summon the Black Tides.”
The pillar in the center of the room still drew Tane’s attention, but my human eyes fell on the final motif, where all three figures stood waist-deep in dark water.Their hands were held evenly here, the suns draped in cloth, and three perfect obsidian moons set in a row.Behind them, a fourth obsidian moon hung, bathing them all in shadow.
“What is this?”I asked.
“The true Black Tide,” Nitha explained.She began to move towards the central pillar, and something in her posture told me to follow.“When the dark of the Other’s moons aligns with that in our world.Four new moons, two Black Tides—the first greater than any natural tide has a right to be, and the second surpassing even that.It happens every few centuries.We are fortunate to live to see one.”
I startled.“We will see one?When?”
“This spring.”
A new rush of questions clustered on my tongue, but they stalled as we rounded the central pillar and my sense of the ghisting flooded back.
There, carved into the other side, was a woman.Adalia Day.She was tucked into the wood as if it were water, every angle fluid and smooth and so utterly lifelike that I feared my mind played tricks on me.She clasped her arms loosely at her chest, cradling the sun and the moon to her skin like precious, breakable things.Her head was bent to one side, hair draped to her ankles, her eyes closed, and her body clothed in just the hint of a spidersilk gown.
As I stared, a ghisting unfolded from the wood.The perfect image of her carving, her statue, her host.
Adalia Day was no simple icon, no rendering of a distant, long-lived woman.
She was a ghisting.
TWENTY-SIX
Mother, Daughter, Saint
MARY
Ah, Mary—Mer—there you—” Charles halted as he rounded the pillar.He was clad in a robe now and was nearly unrecognizable with a clean-shaven face and damp, combed hair.
Behind him, another novice—presumably his guide—fell back and knelt with Nitha on a cushion facing the ghisting.
Adalia Day turned to regard Charles.The sun and the moon were gone from her long-fingered, delicate hands.
Child, she addressed him, then her eyes drifted to me.Sister.
